Text and Pop Culture

A series of experiments around text using pop culture objects

DeveloperProgramming A to Z, Fall 2015September - December 2015 (1-2 weeks per project)

Pop culture is a subject that I've been passionate about for a long time, from the evolution of storytelling in mediums like video games and television to the treatment of female characters in media. A large amount of pop culture is centered around text artifacts: books, comics, analytical literature, and more; so I experimented with playing with text related to pop culture over the course of a semester.

Click on a photo for more details

Classics Madlibs

Main Page

Resulting Madlib

Can a computer be used to recreate the fun of a party game with some of the human interaction removed? Classics Madlibs takes some of the most famous first passages in literature and programmatically creates a game of Madlibs for a person to play solo.

Parts of Speech Visualized

Pride and Prejudice

The novel broken down into parts of speech and visualized using D3.js

Flesch Score of Jane Austen's Work

I ran the Flesch score on several of Jane Austen's novel to see what their complexity is and see if I could draw comparison between these results and the results of the visualization

Mansfield Park

Emma

A Game of Thrones

A Clash of Kings

A Storm of Swords

Flesch-Kincaid Scores for the First Three ASoIaF Novels

Schools teach certain novels based on their thematic relevance, but does the increased use of certain parts of speech correlate to the readability of classic literature? I built a visualization tool that showed the breakdown of parts of speech used in a novel and did a brief analysis of Jane Austen's work from 1813-1817 to test my hypothesis using my visualization tool and the Flesch Readability Calculator to measure readability. I also ran the tools with the first three novels of A Song of Ice and Fire.

Black Widow Bot

Scraping the Data

Setting Up the Bot

Tracking Tags

The dearth of diversity in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (and media adaptations of comics in general) along with the outcry that was raised when the merchandise was released for Avengers: Age of Ultron inspired me to create this Twitter bot, which tweeted possible movies that Marvel would make before they would consider a Black Widow movie. I scraped data from the Marvel API to pull male characters from the comics and generated a random movie before adding #butnoblackwidow (my tag to track my tweets) and #wewantwidow (the trending Twitter tag).